My Photos on Flickr

Sunday, 26 August 2012

This will be my shortest post to date. Another greeny-aqua kind of colour. I doubt I have anything close in my wardrobe, it's not the sort of thing I'd deliberately pick up, and I've no idea how it would be described by most designers. (Camouflage green?) Also I've had a tiring week and by this point in the challenge, I'm starting to get a little jaded. It reminds me of - well. What I DO have - and have been playing around with recently - results in this picture. Time for a little fun - can you spot where I'm hiding?

~ Where's Fledge ~

I actually found it really restful sitting here and contemplating beautiful scenery and the clouds moving past, like the summer we haven't had much of (and Scotland probably less so!) Often I can find tranquillity in SL where I can't in RL, and it helps to zone out a little and blunt the constant demands on my attention. Being a rock and doing absolutely nothing, with no expectations, is very soothing.Location: Highlands of ScotlandAvatar: Grendel's Children 'Tiny Rock' (includes temprez Henge for hiding, dance HUD, wings and writing slate chat typer). I retinted my volcanic basalt version with a nice lichen stone texture; the volcanic rock gives off a fiery 'mist' but I think they have a mossy version that does normal fog - I just turned off particles to take the picture. It is otherwise unaltered except for cropping and border.

Monday, 20 August 2012

When I first saw this colour I thought "Russet" which is a warm reddish brown - I even double-checked by googling and on Chirag's colour wheel which is my adopted guide - so I was at a loss to explain how a nice warm brown could turn out like putty?! Then I happened to notice Russett under Russet on the wheel... why this shade, which has next to no red in it at all, has a name derived FROM red is beyond me, but at least I can stop being indignant that someone with red-green colour blindness had mislabelled russet! I also think this is the colour you get when your kid mixes up all their plasticine/play-doh.Anyway, not much chance of having anything russett in my inventory, I thought it was the right sort of colour for a zombie - and zombie skins I DO have aplenty. {Frick} saved the day there with a skin which was pretty close, and as I was inventory surfing I found some Nomine demos for zombie missing parts addons - they were only L$100 for the set, probably because they utilise invisiprims and won't show up if you have lighting/shadows enabled, so I couldn't resist the purchase even though not everyone will be able to see them inworld. I will use them again though. They came with a really awesome scary skin too but it was the wrong colour for the post so I used the gentler {Frick} version. Zombies can be a little bit sexy too! ;)The location is a roleplay adventure sim with a haunted house and zombies which rez at trigger points and actually fight you (I did some clever double-click tp'ing around to avoid them). The windlight is theirs but I increased the contrast on some of my pictures rather than lose that nice horror show darkness. The sim is great fun but construction of the adventure, with clues and coded tp points, is still in progress. It also hosts some of my favourite macabre stores (Yellow Jester, Snowbound, Weather or Not) and club nights hosted by the DJ who runs Avatar Bizarre.

Sunday, 12 August 2012

Tyrian purple, also known as royal* or imperial purple, has a long history as a dye made from shellfish. It was expensive to produce but the colour would improve rather than fade with wear/weathering and it was used as a mark of status and ceremony. To my mind it is a very pinkish purple, very similar to some of the raspberry pinks, which is why I call it pinkle. The only things I had in this colour were my hair, horns and the pattern on my jump suit, which suggested a cyber raver demon; the wings are old freebies which matched the suit design rather well and were tintable, and I just had to put on my roller skates. *Although we've already done Royal Purple and it wasn't even close to this shade...I don't really know why I had to shoot this on the moon; maybe the sheer impossibility of finding a location to match or at least not clash too much with this colour. But the moon is really rather a good place for a roller-raver disco demon to dance; nice low gravity, lots of space, good lighting - and you know the music won't annoy the neighbours! I took lots of action shots for this one and decided to put together a kind of show reel, since I still don't know how to produce videos in SL. I keep astonishing myself with what I can pull out of my inventory, but bless Bare@Rose for their multiple colour outfits! The colour is actually closer than it looks due to the magenta glow given off by my Poi ribbons, which throws it off a little. I could have turned it off but I liked the glow effect.Incidentally can someone please fix the camera bug which has kiboshed the auto-refresh? Action shoots are so much more difficult now you have to keep clicking 2 buttons, it isn't the effort it's the fact you lose a lot of shots due to the response lag T.T I can't seem to find anyone official who understands what I'm talking about but there are so many photographers on SL, surely this has a well-documented JIRA entry by now?

Sunday, 5 August 2012

We have a slight divergence in colour here - I generally use Chirag Mehta's colour wheel for easy hex and RGB colour values to make sure I can get as close as possible. For Jonquil, Chirag's shade is a lot lighter than the one Luna posted. I went with Chirag's, because the 'official' (challenge) version is almost identical to Dandelion, which we already covered. Honestly it's only a couple of values out (254, 216, 93 vs 250, 218, 94 which is a difference negligible to the human eye) and at first I thought Luna must have grabbed the wrong colour swatch, but the discrepancy exists between different official colour charts. I've noted the value differences at the bottom of the post for anyone who is as interested as me in the quirks of the colour naming system (probably nobody ;)

Colour discrepancies aside, this was my fastest challenge response yet! I tried my new dress first and thought yep, close enough; then had this skin in mind - perfect! - Decided to make a fairy and rummaged about for crazy hair, I have photos of the CHH3 prizes for quick reference and this one jumped out at me; finally just had to find wings, and once more, casually flipping through my wings folders, I tried on this pair and they really worked. So that was all four major pieces of my outfit at first try! Sunflower eyes and jewellery seemed a fitting necessity and at first I was going to try some shoes but decided that a fairy dancing in a meadow would have bare tippy-toes so as not to squash the flowers. I couldn't quite get the skin tone of the feet to match my skin and it shows on the pictures more than I would like, but otherwise I'm really pleased with the results. I went hunting for flower meadows and found this location very quickly, only realising after I'd done the photoshoot that it's part of one of the sims - Oubliette - I already have bookmarked for thorough exploration.

I love putting on pretty avatars and dancing in SL, so here I am, in my element in yellow, a flower fairy dancing in a summer meadow. Note that fairies make their dresses out of feathers, not petals, which is a romantic but impractical idea for tailoring.

~ Flower Fairy Summer Meadow ~

Treading light above the flowers

On fretted fairy wings

At last to rest in meadow bower, while the crickets sweetly sing

There's no place like gnome!

This last picture shows me emerging from a magic portal behind the door of a gnome's house, which leads from inside the little jewellery store to a really amazing underground cavern full of waterfalls; just one of the many surprises in Oubliette, which is an incredible place well worth a visit and a nod to the tip-jar.